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Excel Formula: Remove extension from file name

Here is a list of file names including the extensions, how can you remove the extensions from the file names as below screenshot shown. In this tutorial, it provides a formula to deal with this job, and explains the arguments of the formula and how the formula works in Excel.
doc find position of nth occurrence of a character 1

Generic formula:

=LEFT(filename,FIND(".",filename)-1)

Arguments

Filename: the text string you want to remove the extension from.

Return value

The formula returns the cell contents without extension.

How this formula work

Example: To remove the extension from file names in column B3:B5, please use below formula in C3:C5.

=LEFT(B3,FIND(".",B3)-1)

Press Enter keys to get the result in C3, then drag fill handle down to C5.
doc remove extension 2

Explanation

FIND(".",B3): the FIND function returns the position of a specific character. Here this formula gets the position of character “.”.

=LEFT(B3,FIND(".",B3)-1): the LEFT function extracts text from left side of a text string. Here this formula calculation steps will be shown as below:
=LEFT(B3,FIND(".",B3)-1)
=LEFT(B3,6-1)
=LEFT(B3,5)

Which returns five characters in left side of the text string in cell B3.

Remark

If there are two or more file names with extensions in a cell, this formula only returns the first file name. See screenshot:
doc remove extension 3

Sample File

doc sampleClick to download sample file


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